Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T23:01:19.768Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Biological Conception of Insanity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2018

Extract

I often hear it said that pathological anatomy has proved a failure in the attempt to solve the problems of insanity.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1914 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

(1) One of the most brilliant of Freud's disciples in England tells me that this idea is not and never was held by Freud. Nevertheless, in a brief notice of a work by Freud on “Paranoia” in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (vol. vii, April-May, 1912), my informant writes, expressing, I take it, Freud's views: “in the passage of the normal child from autoerotism to object-love, there is a stage in which, when the auto-erotic impulses are being grouped into a unity so as to seek an external object, the first object utilised is the individual himself, a condition known as ‘Narcissism.’ The passage from this to normal hetero-sexuality leads over homo-sexuality. In dementia praecox Jung and Abraham have shown that what happens is a return to primitive auto-erotic activities. In paranoia, the arrest of development takes place at a later stage, so that the return is to a life of phantasy concerning narcissism and homo-sexuality.” It seems to me that most people would interpret these sentences in the way I have in my text.Google Scholar

Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.